AGTD & Genre as History

[alice wellintown]

The Leise Introduction is a clever reply to the criticisms that
reviewers of P after M&D, a book that many read as a positive turn by
P, and specifically, a turn away from the cartoonish figures, the
Menippean Mouthpieces of, yes, what Frye in Anatomy describes as
cranks in all manner of professions, so that we got in Mason and
Dixon, characters with complex psychological development and the like.
But, as Leise, again, in this clever reading of P and genre,
explains, P has not turned, but continued his parody of the genres
that were in use when Cherrycoke was keeping the children of all
reading ages amused.

Leise then turns to the reading of AGTD after IV, and, as I argued
here when we read that book, argues that IV too is a parody; parody in
the tradition of Poe, parody of the hardboiled detective fiction, not
a negative parody but a positive one.

That Leise falls back on the argument that the cartoons excert a
political force, one that the bias of reading from Aristotle misreads,
is unfortunate because Leise's argument about genre and parody and
poaching, then taken up in the first chapter by McHale, is quite
convincing, and, though it may be compatible with the political
reading, is not dependent upon not comensurate with a political
reading.